Home Sweet Home

Stillwater New York ranked '7th Safest Place' in New York State

January 11, 2014

Stillwater New York has been named the 7th Safest Place in New York State, according to real estate web site. Movoto.com. The website claims there were just 36 reported crimes in 2012 — none of them violent.

Stillwater residents have a 1 in 184 chance of being the victim of a crime, and according to this website, it's theft.

“I never thought somebody would come to Stillwater to say safest place in New York State,” said Donald Ardziewicz, a Stillwater resident for 47 years.

That makes sense, since in Stillwater, the signs don't just read “open”, they say “come in”. Business hours are posted alongside a plate of cookies and milk - and unlike in Chris Christie’s New Jersey, the school buses always get to where they're going on time.

“Everybody knows everybody. If you walk down the street people wave to you - everybody's friendly," says Christina Radley, a Stillwater resident for four years.

Just like the pin says “I love Stillwater”, and so do the life long residents -- which is, pretty much, most of the people who live here.

“I got married here, raised my two kids here now my kids are raising my grandkids here, got to be something about it,” said Sue Cunningham, Stillwater Town Clerk.

Cunningham says getting more people to move to Stillwater would be great, but what the town really needs is new business.

Here are the 10 safest cities in New York, according to Movoto.com: 1. Town of Elmira, 2. Village of Briarcliff Manor, 3. Town of Lewisboro, 4. Irvington, 5. Town of Mount Hope, 6. Village of Pleasantville, 7. Town of Stillwater, 8. Village of Malverne, 9. Kent and 10. Village of Chester.

View WNYT News Channel 13 Story Below ...

How Did They Make This Report?

To create our ranking of the safest cities in New York, we looked at FBI crime statistics from 2012, the law enforcement organization’s most recent report. For the study, we selected cities with a population of 5,000 or more, which left us with 213 locations in total. We then looked at three criteria:

Violent crime (rape, murder, assault)

Property crime (theft, burglary, motor vehicle thefts)

The chance a resident will be a victim of crime

For violent crime and property crime, we calculated the number transgressions per resident. In the case of the chances a resident will be a victim of a crime, we used the total number of crimes in a city. We then ranked each city from one to 213 across these three criteria, with the lower number being the best.

The criteria was then weighted with a greater emphasis placed on violent crime, followed by property crime, and finally the chances a resident will be the victim of a crime. Violent crime made up 50 percent of our ranking, property crime made up 30 percent, and the chances of a resident being the victim of a crime made up 20 percent.

For some perspective, there were a total of 351,073 crimes committed last year across the cities in our study. This means their residents had a 1 in 33 chance of being the victim of a crime overall. The majority of these crimes were property theft; about 79.5 percent, or 279,292 reported crimes.

The city which ranked the worst on our list of the safest cities in New York was Niagara Falls, which had a total of 3,582 reported crimes last year for 50,356 residents. In other words, residents of this city had a 1 in 14 chance of being the victim of a crime.